Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (13 page)

But Eyraud had no reason to fret over that; realities were meaningless to him. He moved in a fantasy world of shadows and lies. To anyone who listened, he was scouting California for just the right site to build a distillery. He was eager to produce volumes of cognac for export to France. He planned a big investment, a sizable operation with at least a dozen stills. Putting fine California cognac in the hands of the French guaranteed an open spigot of profits. Of course, there was no truth to any of it; he meant to build nothing. This smooth-talking French winemaker was just a scam artist whose only aim was to bilk investors and make off with their cash.

San Francisco gave Eyraud cover. It was a freewheeling place, an outlaw kingdom on the bay, with a forest of masts in the harbor and steep hills and sand and dust. He mixed easily with the swagger and wealth, the poverty and drunkenness and degradation. Here was Paris, reimagined San Francisco–style. Rudyard Kipling captured the mood when he visited in 1889 as an unknown twenty-three-year-old newspaperman working for the Indian publication
The Allahabad Pioneer
, several years before the fame of
The Jungle Book, Kim
, and
Just So Stories.
An odd creature to the Americans—short, arrogant,
and British with a mustache and spectacles—Kipling strolled the cobblestone streets marveling at the liberal use of electric lighting and the wondrous operation of the cable cars.
“If it pleases Providence to make a car run up and down a slit in the ground for many miles, and for a twopence-halfpenny I can ride in that car, why should I seek the reason of that miracle?” he wrote. He disparaged “the ‘dives,’ the beer halls, the bucket shops and the poker hells where humanity terrible and unrestrained was going to the Devil with shouting and laughter and song and the rattle of the dice boxes.” In sum, he wrote,
“San Francisco is a mad city—a city inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people.”

While San Francisco gave Eyraud license to imagine vast criminal horizons, it inspired Gabrielle Bompard to yearn for freedom. She’d had enough of Eyraud, his empty talk and brutal eruptions. When she first arrived in Paris, Eyraud had protected her.
“I am certainly grateful to him,” she’d written to her lover in Lille. “But to love him, never. Poor man, he lives on illusions.” Now she wanted out. But she was unable to desert him. If she ran and he tracked her down—what then? She feared he would kill her. It was safer to placate him than to provoke him. Here in San Francisco she had hope of escape. Even if she fell into the hands of the police, she was safer than with Eyraud. She could convince them of her innocence—for she
was
innocent. She was not even complicit, for she had been manipulated into committing that awful crime.

She relied on her wiles for survival, drawing on an animal instinct of self-preservation, a mixture of viciousness and deceit, honed by her years alone in the convents. But she realized she needed help, and she placed all her hopes in one man: Georges Garanger. If only he would come to San Francisco, as he had promised—she dreamed of putting her life in his hands. She dreamed of running away with him. In her mind, he had taken the shape of her handsome liberator.

But would he come? She worried that Garanger was not nearly as interested in her as she was in him. Perhaps he sensed what kind of man Eyraud was—and he had good reason to be wary. Eyraud had his own designs on Garanger. To him, the gentleman was the perfect mark: rich, adventurous, and naïve. Eyraud wanted a good portion of his fortune and was desperate enough to do whatever it took to get it.

As the days flicked past, with no sign of their visitor, Eyraud and
Gabrielle each veiled their private disappointment behind a tense silence. What could be keeping him away? Had he seen their story in the newspapers? Had he gone to the authorities? Even thousands of miles from the scene of the crime, out here in the Wild West, the French fugitives knew they weren’t safe.

And then just as hope was fading, their quarry arrived, courtly, calm, and open-minded. Now the two schemers were in dangerous competition with each other, and the unsuspecting Garanger was trapped in the middle.

Eyraud went to work on him, charming his new friend with tales of his winemaking talents, sermons on the advantages of the California fields, and promises of the waiting market in France. Bit by bit he reeled the rich man in. He tantalized Garanger with his ambitious and wholly bogus distillery project.

Gabrielle, meanwhile, played the enchantress, provocative yet subtle, and the gentleman’s eyes gradually came to rest on her with a rising intensity. Garanger showed his affection for the young Berthe in only the most dignified manner, careful not to offend her father, Monsieur Vanaerd. When the trio was out shopping in the chilly San Francisco air, Gabrielle cooed over a sealskin coat. No sooner had she expressed her wish than Garanger stepped forward with $100 to put it on her back.

For ten days, the new friends toured the Napa Valley, drinking the wines and studying options for Eyraud’s distillery. The con man displayed a sophistication that surprised the local experts.
“He is a regular brandy sharp,” raved V. Courtois, a winemaker in Larkmead. “If we had more like him the grade of our wines and brandies would be raised 100 percent.”

The owner of the Inglenook Vineyard in Rutherford, Captain Neibaum, at first took Eyraud as a charlatan but was soon won over and escorted him into the cellar where in the dark Eyraud correctly graded the brandies. Neibaum was so impressed he invited the sophisticate to return.
“He was way ahead of me on the subject,” the owner admitted months later. “It was a liberal education to hear him.”

One day Eyraud showed Garanger an order he’d placed for twelve stills that would establish his new operation. Then he sheepishly confessed that he had miscalculated the initial costs. He thought the first payment would be only for one-quarter of the total cost but realized
that the bill required a payment of one-third, and to his great embarrassment, he didn’t have that amount available.

Garanger generously advanced Eyraud $200.

What an easy mark he was! Eyraud wasted no time in laying his trap. He told him that his brother-in-law in France had fifty thousand francs belonging to Eyraud’s wife that he was preparing to send to San Francisco. Eyraud’s brother-in-law also was planning to raise an additional five hundred thousand francs for the new business. What’s more, Berthe stood to inherit nine thousand francs when she came of age, and she was eager to invest the funds in the business.

Eyraud then outlined how much money could be made by producing cognacs in California and shipping them to France. Now that Garanger understood the soundness of the business, Eyraud had an offer for him: Why not get in at the beginning? It was a rare, and lucrative, opportunity. Here was how the partnership would work: Eyraud would put up two-thirds of the three hundred thousand francs (roughly $3.9 million in 2013 money) needed as capital and take an equal amount of the profits. Garanger would kick in the rest, roughly a hundred thousand francs in loans, and collect the remaining third of the profits. And in time, Eyraud promised, he would pay back all the money he borrowed.

Eyraud played his dupe flawlessly. Garanger was eager to dig into his accounts and lay down significant backing for a can’t-miss undertaking with an experienced and savvy businessman. Eyraud drew up a contract and Garanger signed it, making him a partner in an imaginary distillery with a man he believed was named E. B. Vanaerd.

After four months of decay, the corpse of the Millery unknown was a nauseating sight. Its humanity had been lost to the ravages of nature. Flesh and organs had been eaten away, leaving behind tufts of hair and a puzzle of bones. The task of extracting an identity, a verifiable link to a once-upright mortal, fell to France’s premier forensic scientist, Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne.

Lacassagne was chief of forensic medicine at the University of Lyon, a chair created for him in 1880. Originally from Cahors, southwest of Lyon, he was educated at the École Militaire in Strasbourg and developed a passion for forensic medicine while serving as a young army doctor in North Africa. In the slums of Tunis and Algiers he discovered the popularity of tattoos—and their value in identifying corpses. His treatise on the subject marked the beginning of his extensive writings on criminology and forensic medicine. He founded and edited a highly regarded journal on the subject called
Archives d’anthropologie criminelle
(Archives of Criminal Anthropology), where for nearly thirty years experts from around the world debated the latest research in the field.

Lacassagne was charismatic, intellectually nimble, and widely versed in medicine, biology, and philosophy. He was well read in subjects far beyond his specialty, amusing friends with passages he memorized from literature and drama. Students flocked to his lectures and colleagues sought out his opinions. He had a heavy mustache and looked older than his forty-six years. One contemporary said the professor had a
“strong, rhythmic step and ever-cheerful eye.”

While his work was grim, Lacassagne kept his friends laughing. He was known for his macabre sense of humor—his summer cottage outside of Lyon had a door knocker that was a bronze casting of
a female criminal’s hand. At his apartment in Lyon, he had a set of plates that bore reproductions of the criminal tattoos that so intrigued him. As charming as he was, there was no escaping the fact that his work was repulsive. He spent so much time up to his elbows in corpses in an era before refrigeration and rubber gloves that he sometimes carried about him a faint odor of rotting flesh.

His contribution to forensic medicine was vast. He researched how blood settled in bodies of the deceased, paying close attention to the formation of the purple splotches known as lividity, and helped pave the way toward a method for estimating the time of death. He had the scientist’s inquiring mind and was often heard to say:
“One must know how to doubt.”

On November 12, 1889, at 4:00 p.m., Lacassagne stepped up to the slate table in his medical amphitheater at the University of Lyon and, with bare hands, began work on the Millery corpse. Clustered around the table were Chief Goron of the Sûreté; Paul Bernard, the medical examiner; Lacassagne’s colleague Dr. Étienne Rollet; Lacassagne’s assistant, Dr. Saint-Cyr; and a state prosecutor named Bérard, who at first sought to prevent the exhumation but finally acquiesced.

It was here in the amphitheater that the professor performed dissections as he lectured to students seated on ascending benches. Now the benches were empty, except for Inspector Jaume seated alone at the very top. The sight on the table was awful enough, but it was the stench that drove Jaume far away to the upper reaches of the room. A corpse’s impact on the nostrils was
“a mixture of every repulsive odor in the world,” as one author has put it, “excrement, rotted meat, swamp water, urine.”

Goron steeled himself: He also was weak in the presence of rotting flesh, a debility that dated back to his days as the police chief in Pantin. Called to an apartment by distraught neighbors, he had discovered two young lovers decomposing on a bed after having carried out a suicide pact two weeks earlier. He managed to stay on his feet only by racing to a broken window and sucking in air.

Now he was so intent on proving his hunch about the Millery corpse that his revulsion was nothing to him.
“I had such eagerness to know if science would confirm my prediction that I forgot the insurmountable repulsion of cadavers that I’d had all my life,” Goron noted in his memoir. “I was only a bit sickened by the odor of the
decomposing flesh but I did not hesitate to stay engaged to better follow Dr. Lacassagne’s learned demonstration.”

Lacassagne’s task was a formidable one. The advanced decomposition was trouble enough, but more annoying was the way Bernard, Lacassagne’s former student, had hacked up the body in the first autopsy. Obviously Bernard had failed to heed a warning the professor had repeatedly delivered in the classroom:
“A bungled autopsy cannot be revised!” The professor was angered at the way Bernard had manhandled the body: The throat had been needlessly butchered; the chest had been ripped apart; the skull was smashed and sections were missing; and the breastbone had been torn away. Had Bernard learned nothing from his professor’s lectures? In the face of this mangling Lacassagne redoubled his efforts and devoted himself to the task with such clear focus that in years to come his work on the Millery corpse would rank as a landmark in forensic medicine.

To determine the victim’s height, he relied on the latest work of his colleague Rollet, who over many years had made significant contributions to the understanding of badly decomposed bodies. Rollet came up with a method for determining a corpse’s height based solely on the size of the bones, findings that he had just published. He studied fifty males and fifty females and discovered that he could correlate with remarkable precision the height of a body from a limited number of remaining bones.

For instance, a humerus—the bone of the upper arm—that measured 13.8 inches usually suggested that the body was five feet nine inches tall. Based on that one bone—if no others were present—Rollet could make a reliable guess. If more bones were available, the guesses became a detailed calculation that was notably accurate. In the first autopsy, Bernard concluded that the corpse was five feet seven inches tall, a guess based on less-detailed measurements.

Lacassagne used a special high-precision instrument to measure the corpse’s arms and legs. Based on the arm bones, he thought the body was five feet seven inches tall; based on the legs, he put it at five feet nine. Rollet had determined that an accurate body size could be calculated from the mean of the bone measurements. By that standard, Lacassagne came up with a body height of five feet eight inches.

When Gouffé went missing, his family had told investigators that he was five feet seven inches tall, a discrepancy that sent Goron racing
to the telephone. Using a recently installed national telephone line, the Sûreté chief soon had his agents in Paris chasing after Gouffé’s military records. Within two hours, the answer came back—Gouffé, the soldier, had been measured at precisely the height Lacassagne had calculated: five feet eight inches.